CLF Report Released: Material Baselines for North America / April 2023

The CLF North American Material Baselines Report provides a snapshot of the state of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for North American-produced building materials. This report includes Background and Methodology; CLF Baselines, and Appendices.

The CLF Baseline values represent an estimate of industry-average GHG emissions for construction materials manufactured in North America. An overwhelming majority of the CLF Baselines published in this report are based on a North American industry-wide EPD if one was available at the time of publication. As such, it is appropriate to use this number as a rough estimate of a product type’s embodied carbon before a specific product has been selected or as a reference value against which product-level comparisons can be made.

Each material category has a detailed appendix that includes a description of the embodied carbon impacts, the available EPDs, and summary statistics. The Appendices in this report allow users to better understand the availability of existing industry-wide and product EPDs, and the variability of product types across a category. The snapshot of available EPDs summarized in each Appendix was assembled using the EC3 database in Fall 2022.

The research team from the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington College of Built Environments included Brook Waldman, Researcher; Allison Hyatt, Researcher; Stephanie Carlisle, Senior Researcher; Jordan Palmeri, Senior Researcher; and Kathrina Simonen, Executive Director